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Business students nowadays are not, for the most part, poets. A growing proportion come to business school with a background in investment banking or management consulting and an undergraduate business major, rather than a degree in the arts and sciences. MBA students are already very familiar with business.

A number of scholars and businesspeople have begun to question the scientific model that dominates business research and teaching. Formalized management tools work well enough if you’re studying techniques for financial valuation, but less so when you’re studying leadership and organizational behavior. Some argue that students could learn a lot more about these subjects if they took a course in literature. Examples from fiction can be as instructive as any business textbook.

HBR senior editor Diane Coutu recently met with Joseph Badaracco, Jr., for a wide-ranging discussion of what leaders can learn from literature. For the past decade, Badaracco, the John Shad Professor of Business Ethics at Harvard Business School, has used classical literature to provide well-rounded, complex pictures of leaders in all walks of life—particularly leaders whose psychological and emotional challenges parallel those of senior executives. Fiction provides some of the most powerful and engaging case studies ever written. Unlike contemporary management literature, which is relentlessly upbeat, classical literature is unsparingly realist. Leaders often struggle and sometimes fail—and the stakes are high. When business leaders read about the conflicts of literary characters, they can better understand their own circumstances.

We pay far too little attention to the inner lives of leaders. Business school courses seem to suggest that you can treat executives like lab animals and control their behavior through their environment. But behaviorism is not enough. Literature suggests that leaders should learn more about themselves if they want to succeed.

It used to be that MBA students went to business school to learn about the practice of management. Most had undergraduate degrees in the arts and sciences. But that’s no longer the case. A growing proportion of students attending business schools today majored in business as undergraduates—or they came to business school with five or six years of experience in investment banking or management consulting. Business students nowadays are not, for the most part, poets. They are people very familiar with business.

Of course, in many ways this experience gives students a head start in their MBA course work. They come in knowing basic accounting; they understand discounted cash flow and regression analysis. But, if you think about it, the very fact that they already are so familiar with the content of the traditional MBA program suggests that MBA students perhaps need a little less in the way of quantitative tools and a little more in the way of good judgment and self-knowledge, as well as a deeper understanding of human nature.

It’s not surprising that a number of scholars and businesspeople have begun to question the direction of business education. Last year in these pages, for example, leadership gurus Warren G. Bennis and James O’Toole argued that business schools have lost their way because of the scientific model that dominates business research and teaching. (See “How Business Schools Lost Their Way,” May 2005.) Business academics are promoted based on the mathematical rigor of their research rather than on the relevance of it. What students get in class, therefore, are highly trained academics steeped in mathematics who are teaching formalized management tools. These tools work well enough if you’re studying techniques for financial valuation, but they are less useful when you’re studying leadership and organizational behavior. Students could learn a lot more about these subjects, Bennis and O’Toole argued, if they took a course in literature. Fiction can be as instructive about leadership and organizational behavior as any business textbook.

For the past decade, Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr., the John Shad Professor of Business Ethics at Harvard Business School, has been offering just that kind of course to the school’s MBA students. In recent years, he has also led discussions about serious literary fiction with executives at HBS. Badaracco uses literature to provide his students with well-rounded, complex pictures of leaders in all walks of life—leaders whose challenges, particularly psychological and emotional ones, parallel those of senior executives. In his classes, Badaracco uses texts such as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Sophocles’s Antigone, and Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” to help students understand questions of leadership, decision making, and moral judgment. Badaracco also examines these issues in his forthcoming book Questions of Character: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership Through Literature (Harvard Business School Press, April 2006).

Recently, HBR senior editor Diane Coutu met with Badaracco for a wide-ranging discussion of what leaders can learn from literature. Their three-hour conversation led to some surprising insights into the many challenges of leadership.

What made you decide to teach literature to executives?

It was a gamble. I was teaching a class on leadership, and I asked a group of very senior executives to read a short story by Joseph Conrad called “The Secret Sharer.” I had no idea whether the experiment would work. In my experience, I have found that many businesspeople associate literary discussions with abstruse academic talk and Freudian imagery. But this wasn’t a class in literary criticism, and I wasn’t looking for the “right” interpretation. I wanted to use the story as a case study.

MBA students perhaps need a little less in the way of quantitative tools and a little more in the way of good judgment and self-knowledge.

Of course, literature is more subjective and open-ended than the typical case studies we do at Harvard, which are fact based, highly researched, and focused on particular issues. But it actually provides us with some of the most powerful and engaging case studies ever written. Serious fiction that has survived the test of time raises more questions than it answers. Think of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. You could learn as much about leadership from that play as you would from reading any business book or academic journal. Its lessons are certainly no less valuable and probably just as pragmatic.

“The Secret Sharer” is a good example of a work of literature that really resonates with executives. The story centers on a new captain who briefly conceals a killer on his ship. This decision violates the law of the sea, but the captain believes that the man is falsely accused. After some heated discussion in our class, most of the senior executives acknowledged that when they looked back on their careers, they had faced decisions that were pretty similar to the captain’s. It may well be that part of becoming a leader involves learning to grapple with very hard trade-offs and almost reckless testing of your limits, and “The Secret Sharer” gave these senior executives a way of talking about those limits.

Is there a particular theme in “The Secret Sharer” that resonates with senior executives?

The premise of this short story, as I see it, is that leaders are not given responsibility, so they must take it—many times emotionally, aggressively, and even forcefully. Often, this is the situation managers face when they are given promotions and new challenges—in business we call them opportunities. In assuming these new roles, managers have to confront their ability or inability to stare reality in the face, their fears of taking on new responsibilities, and, sometimes, their reluctance to be held personally accountable. Do leaders have the inner resources, the direction, the pragmatism, and the force of will to assume these challenges? If not, what’s missing?

Simple answers to these questions don’t help us much. That’s what makes “The Secret Sharer” so compelling. Conrad’s short story is all about questions of character and choice. Early on, the captain faces a choice: Should he let the stranger on board or not? Later, he faces the choice of forcing him off the ship. How does the captain handle his first choice? On the whole, not very well. He responds simply as a human being, feeling empathy for the stranger, liking him, and trusting him.

These days, when there is so much emphasis on empathy and emotional intelligence, this story gives a nontraditional view of leadership.

Empathy is a decent, even noble, impulse of the captain, but his role brings other obligations. He needs to safeguard the ship—but there is no sign that this duty passed through the captain’s mind. Had the captain made the same decision after struggling to determine what was right, we might have more confidence in his choice. But he doesn’t. We can give him credit for empathy, but he seems to have forgotten his new role as the ship’s captain when he fails to consider his other responsibilities and the practical consequences of taking on and concealing a stowaway.

Empathy is a decent, even noble, impulse of the captain, but his role brings other obligations.

As the captain eventually recognizes, empathy is good, but it cannot replace confrontation with the darker sides of one’s own self. Conrad—who, by the way, spent 20 years at sea—suggests that taking responsibility means coming to grips with your “secret” side, your shadow side, your reflective side. There are a lot of unexplored selves that you have to integrate before you can become a leader. This doesn’t transform you from Clark Kent into Superman. But in the process of taking responsibility, the captain does learn to observe and develop himself. He accomplishes this not simply by practicing navigation skills or studying maps but through self-observation and steady, patient steps toward self-mastery.

Why should taking responsibility be an aggressive act?

Conrad does not mince his words. Taking responsibility is a really hard thing to do. The world is a recalcitrant place. Other people will resist you; there are certain risks. Sometimes leaders have to take responsibility by acting directly and forcefully. At the end of the story, when the ship’s mate refuses to follow an order, the captain actually shakes the guy into following his command. He doesn’t hit him, but he physically makes the sailor execute the order.

Of course, no one is suggesting that business leaders use physical force to get followers to step into line. And yet, CEOs sometimes have to act aggressively. There are times when they have to say, “This is the direction we are going in, and you have to get on board.” Now, that’s an aggressive statement. And that’s what taking responsibility sometimes entails, rather than having a discussion and taking a vote. At the end of “The Secret Sharer,” the captain says, like it or not, this is my boat. That’s a forceful, risky, and somewhat scary act.

When leaders take responsibility, are they done with their task?

Taking responsibility is just one of many tests for a leader. One of the hardest challenges is resisting the flow of success. That’s the theme of I Come as a Thief, Louis Auchincloss’s novel about Tony Lowder, a lawyer in his early forties who commits a brilliantly undetectable crime. Despite the advice and pleas of everyone around him, Tony ultimately goes to the authorities and confesses, which destroys his professional life and puts his family in physical danger from the Mafia. Leaders aim at success, not self-destruction, but self-destruction is exactly what Tony has brought on himself, raising one of the most perplexing themes in literature and leadership—the hazards of success. For many leaders and aspiring leaders, the daunting challenge to overcome isn’t poverty or oppression or lack of skill or opportunity. It is, paradoxically, a successful life and career and all that accompanies it.

Tony’s crime and his confession raise some difficult questions: Why does he commit the crime to begin with, and why does he then decide to blow the whistle on himself when he has other alternatives? I believe that Tony acts this way because he senses that success is ruining his life. It looks to others like he has a demanding but well-rounded life, but he’s in trouble, and he dimly knows it. As Edgar Degas once said, “There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic,” and that seems to describe Tony.

The novel shows us that life can look very good when it really isn’t. In Tony’s case, he is always busy, working very hard, making money, building a business, and establishing a reputation. He also treats others with respect, sensitivity, and thoughtfulness. But his ceaseless efforts to meet others’ standards and succeed deadens his emotional life and moral instincts. Of course, Tony isn’t a robot, and he realizes semiconsciously that something is wrong, but he never has the time or impetus to find out what it is. He feels dead inside until he confesses to the crime, then Tony feels excited. To him, the crime acts as a self-administered shock treatment. It wakes him up and makes him feel alive. The crime is wrong, of course, but his way of thinking about it is perversely right—his mind and heart are both engaged. In an odd way, Tony’s decision to commit a crime is his first moral act.

What can leaders learn from Tony Lowder?

Tony’s story poses a challenge: How can men and women pursue success and achievement without being pulled into powerful, dangerous currents that overwhelm them? One answer lies in the peculiar idea that we have serious moral obligations not just to others but to ourselves.

The conventional view suggests that selfishness and altruism are opposites. The more selfish a person is, the less he cares about others; the more altruistic a person is, the more he is willing to sacrifice his own interests. Serious literature suggests a more complicated view. The most admirable people, whether they are extraordinary leaders or ordinary individuals, live and work for others and for themselves. This is nothing to feel guilty about. There is nothing wrong with Tony’s desire to succeed. Machiavelli once wrote that a man without position in society cannot even get a dog to bark at him. Tony’s achievements are real, and they give him the power to make genuine contributions to society. The problem is that Tony needed to learn to underachieve.

Many executives also need to learn to underachieve. It is risky and self-destructive to pour all of yourself into work and leave too little of yourself for anything else. I remember a story I read in a business magazine a few years ago about a very powerful CEO who was described as a good family man. The article told how the executive made sure that he was home for dinner whenever his kids got their report cards. So you figure—four kids, four report cards apiece, 16 dinners a year, tops. I’m sure this CEO spent more than 16 days a year with his family, but I wonder how many more. He seems to have been paying a high price to be a great performer.

I think Auchincloss would argue that paying it—that is, being the best performer you can be—leaves a leader in a very precarious and exposed position. Success can be really seductive, and for a long time, things will go really well at work and in almost all aspects of the high performer’s life. The golden boys in an organization typically don’t experience any of the bumps or mistakes or failures that remind them that some of their achievement is due to extraordinary good fortune. It isn’t all due to their brilliance and hard work. The illusion of success is dangerous. When really tough times come, as they almost always do, those leaders may have nothing to fall back on.

So you think there’s a large element of luck in leadership?

Yes. Another book I teach is about a Nigerian chieftain named Okonkwo. He’s the main character in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which is probably the most widely read African novel. In a scene in the middle of the book, Okonkwo and his village elders gather for a funeral. At the height of the ceremony, with drums beating and guns firing, Okonkwo’s weapon suddenly explodes, and one of the pieces of metal that flies out hits a young man, killing him. The dancing stops once everyone realizes the fate that lies ahead for Okonkwo. Banishment for seven years is the penalty for killing a clansman by accident. So Okonkwo and his wives are forced to leave the village. Then, to expiate Okonkwo’s sin, the villagers level his compound.

I think Achebe is suggesting that moments of testing come in unexpected ways. In “The Secret Sharer,” Conrad is also interested in accidents of fate. At one point, Conrad refers to “the chapter of accidents which counts for so much in the book of success.” It’s significant that Conrad gives the captain no name, which suggests that accidents of fate can happen to anyone.

Many of the authors we are discussing are telling leaders not to kid themselves. At any moment, challenges can leap at you, testing whether you have what it takes to be a leader. No one needs to seek out these challenges, and no one should. Crisis moments like the captain’s in “The Secret Sharer” will come to anyone in a position of responsibility. The captain in “The Secret Sharer” faces his challenge of taking responsibility when he is finally given command of a ship. He is in charge of the boat that night, and the sea is perfectly calm, so he doesn’t expect anything to happen. Then, all of a sudden, he has to deal with a stranger who swims to his ship and claims to be falsely accused of murder because he killed a sailor whose failure to follow orders endangered his own ship. So that may be another element of these tests: They’ll probably come out of nowhere.

Many accidents can derail your life and career, including ones involving health, which most of us take for granted. Consider Richard Gerstner. In the mid-1980s, he was at the height of his career. I met him when he was running IBM Japan, and a lot of people thought he might be the next chairman of IBM.

But then he got sick. A series of consultations with the world’s top doctors didn’t uncover the problem. His illness became so debilitating that Gerstner retired from IBM. Eventually, he was diagnosed with Lyme disease. He received treatment and was ready to go back to work. But, by then, IBM had tapped Gerstner’s younger brother Lou—who had never worked for a computer company—for the top job that Richard had hoped for. Call this fortune or fate, but there is so much outside our control.

Business scandals have stoked a lot of skepticism and distrust in the community. What can literature teach us about what a good moral code looks like?

In one way or another, morality is the theme of most great works of fiction. But serious literature rarely endorses black-and-white morality. Let’s go back to Things Fall Apart. Essentially, the story is about Okonkwo’s struggles to come to terms with the colonial missionaries who move into his world and challenge his deep beliefs and way of life. Okonkwo is driven, focused, and talented—in other words, he is the psychological and emotional counterpart of the strong, determined people who run most organizations today. But as the story unfolds, he loses his followers, falls into despair, and kills himself.

So what has happened to this once-successful African chieftain that he cannot put up a fight against the colonialists? What we learn from Okonkwo is the danger of adhering blindly to rigid moral codes in times of change. Okonkwo believes that the simple moral code of his early years is all he needs to lead his people. But this mistaken belief turns his determination and firmness into liabilities rather than the assets they could be; they push him further down the wrong track. Sometimes, for leaders, morality is not as simple as looking up the rules and following them. Okonkwo never understands this.

So, serious literature encourages leaders to break the rules?

Fiction suggests that in facing their day-to-day challenges, leaders may need to embrace a more complex code of ethical behavior than they may have learned as children. Real morality is not binary; it comes in many shades of gray. Leaders need moral codes that are as complex, varied, and subtle as the situations in which they find themselves. This does not mean abandoning basic values or embracing moral relativism. What it does mean is that over the course of a career, leaders may have to embrace a wide set of human values. Like Okonkwo, executives sometimes don’t grasp this idea. They mistakenly believe that the simple moral code of their early years is all they need to be leaders.

Leaders may need to embrace a more complex code of ethical behavior than they may have learned as children.

For instance, I know of a successful executive who recently joined a small, fast-growing firm run by a longtime friend. After just a couple of weeks on the job, the executive found evidence that the company had been booking revenues for sales that hadn’t actually occurred. He confronted his friend and the board and eventually resigned. The company issued a press release saying the executive had stepped down because the demands of the job were greater than he had expected. But the markets saw through this ruse. They halved the company’s stock price, and they derailed a planned stock offering. The firm soon declared bankruptcy.

On the surface, the executive seemed to have acted courageously and correctly. He refused to participate in accounting dishonesty and stood up to his friend and the board. However, by following his clear-cut code of ethics, this executive triggered the destruction of the company. A harder path would have been to give the president and the board the option of disclosing the problems and taking dramatic steps right away. This would have given the company a fighting chance, but the executive, believing that he was following his conscience and doing the right thing, apparently never considered it. The question is whether his moral code was just too rigid.

Does literature suggest that leaders be pragmatists when it comes to morality?

The clash between principles and pragmatism is one of the hardest tests of a leader’s character. Of course we want our leaders to be both principled and pragmatic. Principles alone qualify men and women to be preachers or saints. Pure pragmatists can open their tool kits and get down to work, but their amorality makes them dangerous. As many leaders know, sometimes the worst conflict is between two strongly held principles. Navigating that can be harder than trying to keep a balance between principles and pragmatism.

In his play Antigone, the ancient Greek dramatist Sophocles shows what can happen when leaders are motivated by principles alone. Even though Antigone is set in a different era, it is relevant to leaders facing the high-pressured environment of today. This is partly because Sophocles takes a very broad view of leadership. One of the main characters, Creon, is the new ruler of Thebes. He fits the classic definition of a leader because of his official role and authority. The other central figure is Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, the former king of Thebes. Antigone has no formal position, but she represents the social and religious leaders throughout history who have mobilized others through their deep, personal commitment to fundamental moral values.

Antigone wants to bury her brother in accordance with religious law, but Creon has declared her brother a traitor because he started a civil war. Creon issues an edict that Antigone’s brother be left unburied, to be eaten by dogs and vultures. When Antigone proceeds with the burial, Creon sentences her to death.

Antigone’s fundamental principle is religion; Creon’s is country. Both characters are strongly committed to their views. Yet, at a deeper level, the two leaders are similar in an unfortunate way. Both take a single, important human value—religion for Antigone and civic duty for Creon—and pervert it. They each do this by taking that single value and using it like a scythe to mow down all other considerations. Antigone and Creon let their single value dominate not just their thinking but their personalities. We see the same thing today in organizations when leaders are unable to see beyond their own agendas for truth, change, and human development.

Let’s talk about one of the few protagonists who actually is a businessperson. You’ve said Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman had the wrong dreams. What are the right dreams? Is this just the vision thing?

Miller would never have equated dreams with corporate vision. Rather, he saw dreams as a crucial inner resource for leaders. He suggests that dreams drive all of us, but the wrong dreams can be slow-acting poisons. The fall of Willy Loman illustrates the noxious power of certain dreams. The play raises a difficult question for leaders: How do you know when your dreams are toxic?

The conventional wisdom about Death of a Salesman is that Willy embraces a corrupt version of the American dream that defines success as money, status, and celebrity. The play was written in the late 1940s, and some critics saw it as a brilliant indictment of modern American capitalism.

But this view treats Willy as an anticapitalist icon and not as a human being. Another possible interpretation of the play is that Willy doesn’t dream with his eyes wide open. This sounds paradoxical; dreams are meant to resist pragmatism. At the same time, it is uncompromising realism—about the world and about oneself—that separates dreams from delusions. Willy’s dreams are a gossamer—fragile and fanciful. He is naively optimistic, and his dreams lack the basis in reality necessary to grow and reshape themselves over time. Good dreams have deep roots in everyday life, not in the seductions of the society around them. Someone said that the test of a vocation is the love of its drudgery. A successful management career is challenging and rewarding in so many ways that it may seem odd to emphasize drudgery. But Death of a Salesman suggests this may be a better test of a healthy dream than excitement or inspiration.

In the texts you discuss in your classes, several protagonists commit suicide. One lands in prison. Another character is sentenced to death. Does all this grimness really resonate with businesspeople?

I wasn’t deliberately trying to choose grim literature. Certainly I don’t mean to suggest that business is a grim endeavor. If I felt that, I would encourage MBA students to look for other lines of work. The fact is that in business you have to be confident and believe that most of the time you’re going to succeed. This is the opposite of grim.

At the same time, unlike contemporary management literature, which is relentlessly upbeat, serious literature is unsparingly realist. We find no quick hits of inspiration, no stories of unalloyed success, or five-step programs for happiness. The leaders portrayed in literature sometimes fail and often struggle. The pressure is on because the stakes are high. When business leaders read about the struggles of literary characters, they can better understand their own conflicts. Still, fictional stories don’t lead to cynicism, passivity, or despair. Literature can be hopeful and even inspiring because its questions and lessons are hard-won and real. This realistic approach provides a deeper, more enduring kind of encouragement.

Throughout this conversation, you have emphasized the need for leaders to reflect. Why is this so important?

We pay far too little attention to the inner lives of leaders. A lot of what you learn in business school seems to suggest that you can treat executives like lab animals whose behavior can be controlled if you get the environment right. Pay-for-performance systems, for example, assume that the right pellets, like stock options, will produce the right behavior. And Sarbanes-Oxley is really just about giving bigger shocks to misbehaving rats and shining brighter lights on them.

This kind of behaviorism is not enough. Serious fiction suggests that leaders should learn more about themselves if they want to succeed. In other words, before you set out to change the world and manage other people, you should look inside yourself and see whether you are ready to be a leader. You should reflect on how well you can manage yourself. That takes time, and it is an unnatural act for action-oriented people. And you may not like what you see. But if Sophocles teaches us that leaders cannot escape their flawed humanity, he also suggests that we can lower the risks of error and tragedy through sound reflection. Productive deliberation is a chaotic process of going back and forth, zigzagging between feelings, thoughts, facts, and analysis. It resists the temptation to grasp hold of a single grand principle and allow it tyrannize all other considerations. As Antigone strongly suggests, the best reflection involves dialogue with others. Solitary, self-designated geniuses are a prescription for disaster.

A version of this article appeared in the March 2006 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Diane Coutu is the director of client communications at Banyan Family Business Advisors, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is the author of the HBR article “How Resilience Works.”

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